Women Direct Media Series Brings Filmmaker to Campus

Documentary filmmaker and activist Jacquie Soohen will be spending three days at the College in March as the Women Direct artist in residence. Soohen is the first of two filmmakers being brought to campus this spring to participate in the Women Direct Festival and Symposium. Soohen will conduct two master classes, meet with students in the women’s studies course Feminism/s in Action, and informally exchange ideas with students and faculty. She will also present three public screenings of films she directed. Free and open to the public, the screenings will take place at 7:00 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium.

On Monday, March 18, Soohen will screen and discuss two works. 9.11 --- produced in New York City in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center --- portrays a city trying to come to terms with the events of September 11. Also shown will be excerpts from This Is What Democracy Looks Like, a documentary shot on the streets of Seattle during the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests.

On Tuesday, March 19, the presentation will focus on Black and Gold, a film depicting the transformation of the Latin Kings, one of the largest street gangs in New York, into an urban political force. Now known as the Latin King and Queen Nation, the group is hailed by some as an important political voice while decried by others as the same old criminals with a new public relations campaign.

On Wednesday, March 20, Soohen will present Zapatista, the story of peasants rising up in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994 and demanding basic human rights.

Soohen is a producer and director with Big Noise Films, a nonprofit media collective dedicated to developing alternative channels of communication and fighting the apathy and fear that grow out of cultural isolation.

Begun 21 years ago as Women Direct and renamed the Women Direct Festival and Symposium in 2001, the series brings scholars and artists to Ithaca College to screen and discuss films, videos, and digital media works by women.

Soohen’s public screenings are also part of the Cinema on the Edge program in the Roy H. Park School of Communications.

The Women Direct Festival and Symposium will also bring filmmaker Stephanie Black to campus in late March and early April for a master class and a public screening of Life and Debt, her film about Jamaica, sweatshops, and the global economy.

For more information contact Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema and photography, at 274-3431 or at patty@ithaca.edu.